I may have crippling insomnia, but at least I'm not getting sniped?
There are a bunch of ways I could probably go for a meatless entrée. Particularly if I'm talking about something I might get at a restaurant. But there's really only two that have stuck in my home cooking rotation from back when I tried the meatless Monday thing. Again, a lot of this is probably having kids. They're not eating any of the Indian dishes that I could probably select. But one thing my kids will eat is beans. Particularly since they've been informed for some time now that beans are "good for the heart."
Pick 7.x Italian Style Beans and Greens on some Thick gosh darn Toast
Now, in truth, my kids are pretty iffy on the "and Greens" part of this dish, but I can always just pull out their portion before wilting in the kale, spinach or whatever because apparently no store has ever heard of ####### escarole in the Washington DC area. But I digress.
Now, this is very much more of a concept than a "recipe" per se. I'm going to link a few different videos/preparations and spend the rest of this post condescendingly opining. Because, particularly at 4 AM, I gotta be me.
Now, I've done this with canned beans and I've done this with a variety of dried beans, and here is my verdict. UNLESS you have a source of good heirloom dry beans (like easy access to Rancho Gordo beans), just use canned Cannelini beans. The dried beans you get at supermarkets just aren't going to give you a better product whatsoever, much less one that justifies turning a 20 minute meal into a four hour meal.
So let's look at some videos and make jokes about people getting cancelled! Here's one from
Carla Lalli Music. I remember when I was obsessively following the Bon Appetit test kitchen early in the pandemic. Then it came out that they were essentially paying the white contributors for videos and treating their presenters of color as unpaid video slavess. And the editor of the magazine surfaced in black face. And an article revealed that Carla was ####ty to interns. Good times! But I do like this video for one reason. It really did open my eyes as to how much fat (a staggering amount of olive oil or whatever), you should use when making dry beans. Carla is doing her own thing on YouTube outside the BA test kitchen now.
Speaking of cancelled, did someone say Allison Roman? You could probably fill out this entire category just based on Allison Roman bean stews. Her "cancellation" amused me, because Allison did make fun of Marie Kondo's voice, which was legitimately ####ty. But she also just kind of said that she didn't want to run a massive operation like Chrissie Teigen and prompted some big victim tears from Chrissie and pretty sustained campaign from Chrissie's followers. And the narrative became that Allison hated women of color and was, in any case, "culturally appropriating" recipes because she liked turmeric or some ####. Then we learned Chrissie was like a legitimate cyber bully telling people to kill themselves in DMs and Chrissie got cancelled! Awesome. Allison came back under her own banner (instead of the New York Times). Weirdly, she's using a lot less exotic spices and steering pretty far away from "takes" on Asian cuisines. I include
this video because I can never figure out whether I find Allison's personality attractive or annoying.
Finally a
good video using the canned beans. I don't think Shira Bocar has been cancelled, but of course her boss flat out did time. Badass. This is closest to how I would do it on weekday.
